The first session I checked out was by Billy Chia, the Asterisk Marketing Manager for Digium and it was a packed house. I didn't count people, but it must have been at least 80-100 people. Billy gave a live demo running Asterisk on a virtual machine on his Mac where he ran into a minor snafu where restarting Asterisk wouldn't fix his sip reload command. Nothing Bill Gates BSOD during a demo cringe-worthy, and Billy handled it well.

At AstriCon, Xorcom today released a new hybrid (VoIP + PSTN) telephony solution called the CXE4000 featuring Xorcom's CompletePBX distro (based on Asterisk and FreePBX). The CXE4000 is a heavy-duty, stand-alone, pre-configured, out-of-the-box IP PBX It is optimized for businesses with extremely high call volumes and / or additional communication applications.

At the last ITEXPO in Las Vegas I spoke with Xorcom's Ruth Bridger who talked about their CompletePBX solution, which is based on Asterisk and FreePBX with Xorcom's secret sauce added in. I recall her mentioning how they use USB to add scalability and redundancy to their product line. Indeed, the new CXE4000 supports various combinations of telephony ports via Astribank units connected via USB2: up to 960 PSTN/analog phones ports, up to 24 E1 R2 / T1 CAS PRI ports, up to 1500 users and up to 750 concurrent calls.

I’m excited to be attending the 10th annual AstriCon, which also happens to nearly coincide with my 10 year wedding anniversary back in August of this year. AstriCon has changed over the years, new people, new exhibitors, but a lot has also stayed the same. Asterisk legends like Mark Spencer and Joshua Colp are speaking at AstriCon. FreePBX project leader Philippe Lindheimer is here and keynoting this week, as is WebRTC evangelist Phil Edholm, and Edvina’s Olle E. Johansson.

Today is the pre-conference, so the exhibits open tomorrow. Companies that utilize Asterisk and are participating including Elastix, Xorcom, YeaLink, snom, Grandstream, Schmooze / FreePBX, Sangoma, Algo, PBX in a Flash, and more.

Odyssey Telecommunications is a relatively new company started up in Buffalo, New York. Odyssey Telecommunications helps telecommunications and VoIP manufacturers, resellers and service providers liquidate overstock, used and new equipment through its online and offline channels.

Odyssey Telecommunications was recently named to Inc Magazine’s annual list of the fastest growing companies in the United States. With three year sales revenue growth of 1,140%, Odyssey Telecommunications was ranked the #388 on the list and had $3.3 million in revenue in 2012. Ironically, VoIP Supply is also in Buffalo, NY, so I pondered to myself, since when/how/ and why did Buffalo, NY become the mecca of both used (Odyssey Telecommunications) and new (VoIP Supply) telecom equipment?

To find out more I interviewed Justin Wekenmann, Co-Founder and EVP of Odyssey Telecommunications.

1) Tell me a little bit about your founding members, where they came from, and how Odyssey Telecommunications got started

The FreePBX and Schmooze Communications team have been on a tear, acquiring some legendary FreePBX and Asterisk talent! Derek Peloquin, joined Schmooze in August taking with him his nearly 8 years of experience with the Asterisk Project and Community. In his previous role as Senior Technical Trainer at Digium Inc, Derek provided Instructor Led Training and seminars as well as developing classroom curriculum, certification exams and online training videos.

Want to hear the story of how an Estonian startup changed the communications landscape forever? With the 10 year anniversary this year, Microsoft has written an online history book on Skype with the following intro, "In one rather turbulent decade, Skype transformed itself from a rowdy Estonian startup to a multibillion-dollar Microsoft asset. Skype has significantly changed the way the world communicates, obliterating the notion of distance, whether it’s a soldier using Skype to experience the birth of his child, an explorer speaking to a classroom of children from beneath the ocean, or pair of young lovers who leave Skype running as they fall asleep hundreds of miles apart – but still together."

It's a fascinating read complete with pictures, infographics, slideshows, paginated chapters and more. If you are a Skype aficionado, go take a gander.

Steve Wozniak "the Woz", Steve Job's right-hand man was the featured keynote speaker at ITEXPO. I captured a few videos of him speaking. My plan was to capture just a single video, but my iPhone 4S rang (on vibrate) in the middle of me video recording and it stopped the video recording! Why did Apple put calling priority higher than video recording?

At ITEXPO I met with Applied Global Technologies (AGT), which was founded in the early 1990s, making it one of the oldest video conferencing solutions on the market, even if it isn't very well known. AGT offers managed video services and cloud video services that can be white labelled by service providers. They mentioned Level3 whitelabels their solution, as well as AT&T.

They currently support 720p resolution with support for mobile, Mac, PC, Polycom.